President Joe Biden wants to make mental healthcare more accessible by boosting the enforcement of parity rules, according to a March 15 Bloomberg Government report.
President Biden's plan includes asking payers to offer a sufficient network of mental healthcare providers and three annual patient visits without cost-sharing.
Mental health disorders among Americans and a lack of healthcare providers to treat them are continuing to worsen. From 2019 to 2021, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that symptoms of anxiety or depression among American adults quadrupled to 40 percent.
The American Psychiatric Association says that payers should be penalized for failing to offer accessible mental healthcare plans.
“We need to make sure there is some penalty for not doing it right,” Saul Levin, MD, chief executive officer and medical director for the American Psychiatric Association, told Bloomberg.